Category: Philosophy

Scruton has done invaluable work showing us the form conservative efforts have taken in defending culture’s role in establishing virtuous, free societies but has for the most part left the political persuasion's specific content open for discussion.

What separates the conservative political agenda from the liberal? A host of issues, almost all of which can be traced back to a pivotal divergence occurring during the last century. More than any single policy disagreement, what best characterizes the rift between Right and Left is their incompatible theories of knowledge, the conflict between their beliefs about what constitutes genuine sources of understanding.

Our ethical commitments, aesthetic ambitions, and devotion to civil ideals lose their logical force and allure when subjected to the constraints of materialism, and if Secular Humanists wish to live authentically and with intellectual integrity they must recognize the limitations their uncompromising view imposes upon our activity.

Asclepius was the Greek god of curing illnesses, and scholars generally interpret Socrates as meaning that death was a kind of healing from the trials of life for which he owed Asclepius a debt. This interpretation perfectly accords with the rest of the dialogue in which Socrates argues for the immortality of the soul and the advantages of entering the afterlife.

The classic construal of the problem of evil raises the question of the logical compatibility and evidential probability of God’s existence given the conspicuous prevalence of human and animal suffering. In this paper, I wish to address objections to God’s existence based on the contention that the prevalence of suffering is logically incompatible with an … Continue reading Divine Command Theory and The Problem of Evil→

In his few published remarks concerning the nature of religious faith, Wittgenstein calls into question the function of historical events in the grounding of religious convictions. In a series of lectures and notebook entries dating from the decade between 1930 and 1940, he argues that language operates uniquely when used to communicate ideas of religious … Continue reading Wittgenstein on Ethics and Faith→